Parallels Desktop, Debian, Cloning VMs and Networking

Feb 27, 2010

If you clone a Parallels virtual machine
running Debian or
Ubuntu you may find that the clone comes up
sans networking. I encountered this problem reproducibly with VMs
running Debian 5.0, Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 9.10. While eth0
exists and works on the source VM, it does not exist on the clones which
instead have eth1. Apparently this is a known
issue with
Debian-based distributions.

To get the network up on the cloned VMs edit the file
/etc/network/interfaces, replacing all references to
eth0 with eth1 (or whatever the interface ends
up being named on the clone). Save your changes and restart networking.

I was a little perplexed by this when it happened, but given how easy it
is to fix and how behind I am on my work, I just don’t care.